Beauty

Beauty

i.

Beauty’s tough
as nails, a figure
of speech meant to shock, negate its own
proposition begins with beauty
which nails in their boxed
plenitude commonly are not
seen as
but a nail can be
a beautiful thing in the carpenter’s hand
where it means form’s hold, or the steel
sheen of that nail’s skin, called Asha
in Avestan which Keats saw precisely, beauty
and truth, that singular vibe, the point being
you can buy it and sell it, turn it
into mass produced eroticized
female body part enhancements
for a nifty profit, then dismiss it
as frosting that masks wrong ideas
and wronger invasions but you still
can’t own it, can’t contain the shock
occurs where it lives, between
you-and-peachstreaked-dawn
you-and-storm’s-rage
you-and-lark’s-liquid-song
you-and-Rothko’s-colours
influx of, spell of
what philosopher’s call
intelligible splendour
that touch of elsewhere’s
lips on your neck
from beyond the pale
sends your soul reeling
through earth’s broken
heart alive with finitude’s joy,
tough as nails

ii.

I found this poem in a dark corner
of a forgotten room covered in cobwebs

and dust behind enigmatic teacups grace
the world with stillness and solitude, melancholy

relish of desert’s burning dusk from a rock pool
with James who was about to die, misshapen

chipped and cracked, used over and over
by all those hands, those years, Time

and earth and touch conspiring to balance
creation in a marred cup where flaws

are welcomed to meet eternity’s demand
that we make it matter, forms we find

in mind no different than a whale or that twisted
oak, to quote Miles, it’s all about the next note—

that’s as close to redemption
as you’ll find
in these parts

iii.

for the first time
the Siberian Iris
I planted so long ago
will push through
cold hard earth
unfold their simple
purple joy
without me
to greet them

iv.

Our jaws dropped is the answer
to whatever happened to beauty, and
what’s cognitively void is a question
for the drain beauty knows well, Duchamp
having flushed art down its yawning white
porcelain throat, not shoved aside
or detonated but redistributed beyond
what’s already been approved, an alive
between, what’s left begs to be seen
for simple lines rescued from aesthetic
impact, a state brings to mind
a six car pileup on the 401
not to mention
Mr. Fancy Pants Kant’s joyous, smiling
pleasant sensation
They say Hemingway
jumped off a truck headed to the front
in Spain when he spotted a dead dog
decayed in a ditch at the edge of the road,
had to find words for it, urgently,
the question
of beauty dwelling in the world
it brought to attention,
roadside cypress sentinels, odour of death, clouds,
intense sky, white glimpse of bone, armies
in the distance, each
squirming maggot
blue more blue, white more white, lifedeath
feeding itself
a thing of beauty
neither joyous nor pleasant
just this
sharper, deeper
more this than before

v.

They used to say evil was Nothing, just
absence of whatever you call good, empty
at the edge where Light peters out, nothing
substantial which leaves the world whole (a way

around the Devil in a black hat gunning for God
in a white one and the endless slug fest
that breeds all the way into your kitchen)
a little lopsided with Light the winner, not

unlike ugly (formed from fear’s root),
has no noun within itself as beauty does,
lacks mystique of the substantive, however
illusory (though plural uglies along with to bump
has some traction) condemned merely
to be attached to a noun which gets all
the glory, no there there, never the thing
unless you add the ness which had a certain

je ne sais quoi when we still got to say
uggsomeness, whose poetic value
is obvious, but we gave that up and now
it’s just wishy-washy abstract ugliness

a dump left behind in the street by the Thug State
and its Doom Program in their rampage
to deface beauty and make the world
useful as well as killing whatever they can’t

understand and reinstituting human
slavery as a business option,
which is not Nothing in most people’s
book, though that doesn’t mean it owns

its own Black Hat either, more like a mystery,
the two of them, beauty and ugly, Jesus
and Judas, Thor and Loki, Martin and Lewis,
stroll through our lives arm in arm

with the ease of old lovers while we stutter
befuddled by demands to cohere, choose
a side, cheer loudly for Tom Cruise or John Wayne, assured
of our virtue,unable to hear the knock on the door

vi.

Threnody for Case (2017-2026)

Beauty remains in the heart
of the anguish, a green blush
against the blue April sky, thrill
of sap surge sets trees vibrating and Case’s
ghost on the path, still running
his heart out, mine too, all the pieces
that he left behind, his beauty
as perfect as it gets around here,
the glorious trail we walked
together with a kind of love vibrates
with the awakening trees as he
chases squirrels with the enthusiasm
of new love, refuses to believe he
can’t leap to the top of the treeIf there are
no words large enough to hold the pain, how
measure love’s wound, what inches are there
for his last walk, pushing himself through
whatever it was held him back
from the strength he remembered, the speed,
determined, his face clenched against
death’s drain, the knowledge pooling
in his belly with the blood, till he fell
panting, never to walk againThe stigma
of finitude stinks,
but beauty
does lurk in the folds of his broken
body where he lives the release
of his power, lickety split, a flash
through the bush, hard and fast
as his spirit yearns to be everything
flesh makes possible, sheer animal joy
at the limit of unleashedBeauty is strange,
as Kent used to say, the Kizeamon cup
for instance, old, chipped, or on the floor
face to face with his yellow eyes,
remarked on by many strangers, which I
now recall from H.D. are also
Azrael’s eyes, Angel of Death Case’s eyes
alive with knowledge—flutter—
rich with exchange of our souls—flutter—
lit with unspeakable love—flutterflutterand close